It's Cows And Cows And Cows And Cows, And That's A Nice Thing

Welcome to another edition of Yr Sunday Nice Things feature, where we take a break from the daily craziness so we can decompress for a little while. Today, we're going to relax with the ineffable mental calm that comes from an oddly rectangular English cow. It's really beautiful to see what can happen when people all over the internet come together to collaborate on a little art project. We call it...

The Bovine Comity

It all got started with a tweet from the absolutely wonderful Museum of English Rural Life, an organization (sorry, organisation) you should definitely follow on Twitter. Based at the University of Reading, the MERL's Twitter description declares its mission is "Chaotic Good." You may remember them from that time when one of their exhibits, a mousetrap patented in 1861, caught a mouse from 2016. Talk about a movie anachronism!

Unfortunately, replied a reader, sometimes it's difficult to be the Peace Cow in a world gone mad:

And then the photoshoops began, encouraged, of course, by the MERL, which helpfully included a copy of the cow, to be inserted as folks might like:

(If you want to do your own cow art, you'll need to click on the tweet there; for reasons, the transparent .png file doesn't reproduce on this page)

The responses were, predictably, silly and brilliant. To get around our platform's annoying habit of inserting the original tweet every damn time (it doesn't like Twitter's embed code, which lets you leave out the "parent" tweet), we have reproduced the pics and copy-pasted the tweeters' comments (if any) below, avec linky.

But it occurs to us that the replies to the original tweet are missing out on a rich vein of artistic culture! Where are the works of America's Greatest Artist, Jon McNaughton? Consider that oversight corrected.